"What a strange fellow you are, Steenie! Why, supposing as you say, such a very wild improbable circumstance were to occur, I should be heartily sorry for poor Adelais! Only imagine me with such a wife as she would make! Why I wouldn't have so transparent, white- skinned a beauty about my house all day for a mine of gold! I should be seized with lunacy before long, through mere contemplation of her very unearthliness, and be goaded into fancying her a picture, and hanging her up framed and glazed over my drawing-room mantelpiece! No, no, I'll leave Miss Cameron for you, you're just her style, I take it; but as for me, I never thought of marrying yet, Steenie, for I never yet had the luck or ill-luck to fall in love, and certainly you'll allow that nobody ought to think of marriage until he's really in love. So I'll wish you all success, old boy, and mind you write and tell me how the wooing gets on!"
O Maurice! Maurice!
Then, by-and-by, the young officer sailed, and Adelais heard of his going, and her heart died within her for greatness of sorrow and pain, yet still she held her peace, and lived her life in patience.
And so for two whole years they kept her by the sea, hoping against hope, and whispering those idle convictions that affection always suggests, about the worst being over now, and the time of convalescence being always tedious and unpromising. But in the third year, when the autumn days grew darker, and the sun set redder in the sea, and people began to talk again of Christmas, Adelais called her brother one evening and said:—
"Philip, I have been here very long, and I know that nothing more on earth can ever make me well again now. You will not refuse me the last request I shall make you, Phil? Take me back to the old house at Kensington, that I may see dear old Mr. Gray, and my friend Stephen, once more; and you, Phil, stay with me and Auntie there until I die, for it won't be very long now, and I want to see you near me to the last."
So they brought her back again to the old house, next door to the wine merchant's, and they carried her over the threshold, because she was too weak to walk now, and laid her on the old sofa in the old place by the window, for she would have it, and Philip Cameron did her bidding in everything. And that same evening, Stephen Gray came in to see her, and they met as old friends meet who have been long parted, and sat and talked together until past sunset. But at length Adelais asked him for news of Maurice, what he was doing, and how he was, and when they heard from him last, and what he thought of India and of the new life there, and his companions, and the climate, and the customs of the place; for she never guessed that Stephen knew of her hopeless love. But Stephen turned away his face and answered her briefly, that his brother was well and prosperous, and wrote home constantly. How could he tell her that Maurice had already found himself a rich handsome wife in India?
Chapter III.
Soon after these things, old Mr Gray fell ill of a violent cold, which attacked him suddenly one afternoon on his return from his office. It was Christmas weather then, and the cold and the frost of the season were unusually keen, so that the physician, whom Stephen called in to see his father, looked very grave and dubious; and before many days of his patient's illness were past, he asked the young man whether there were any brothers or sisters of his, whom the merchant might wish to see. Stephen's heart beat fast when he heard the ominous question, for he understood what tidings the grave tone and the strange inquiry were meant to break to him, and knew well that the physician who spoke was one of the wisest and most skillful in London. But he answered as calmly as he could, and talked of Maurice, and of the boy's fondness for his father, and added, that if there were really imminent danger, he should like his brother to be called home, because he was sure Maurice would wish it; but that otherwise the voyage was tedious and the need unimportant.
"Let him be sent for," said the physician. "There is just time."
So Stephen wrote to his brother, and bade him leave his wife with her parents in India, and come home quickly, if he would see his father again, for the time was short, and in those days the only way open to Maurice was the long circuitous sea-route.